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BREAKING NEWS

VINTAGE PAPERBACK EDITION OF

ROBERT REDFORD: THE BIOGRAPHY by Michael Feeney Callan

PUBLISHED May 15, 2012

 

*Read the reviews of ROBERT REDFORD: THE BIOGRAPHY on the BOOKS tab.

 

 

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LETTER FROM MICHAEL: ANNOUNCING NEW BOOK

THE CHALLENGE OF POETRY

My favourite poet is Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who reminds me a lot of John Lennon. Both spoke more than they ever wrote and struggled with myself-as-individual and myself-as-representative man. More than anything they struggled with the inconsistencies of their inner lives, their social observations and the medium they chose. Coleridge found an audience and success with the Lyrical Ballads and, of course Lennon scored with the Beatles. But within their copious unfinished work lie great treasures which sum up the problem of poetry. The first recorded poem is the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh. Today's most popular poetry is rap. So poetry endures. But its value and relevance are always in debate. It was Plato, in the Socratic dialogues, who death-marked the poet. His Republic of philosopher kings had no place for the poet, though his challenges to the Homer-obsessed Ion moderate his position, suggesting irony, if not equivocation, in his view of the perfected soul. Sir Philip Sidney's Apology for Poetry (1579) tackles Plato, arguing that poetry is an active instrument, valuable beyond history or philosophy in stimulating progressive thought. In his essay collection Biographia Literaria (1817), Coleridge himself upheld Sidney's utilitarian view of what poetry should and could be and Percy Shelley, king and completist among the Romantics, threatened to draw swords on the naysayer Thomas Love Peacock when he wrote in A Defence of Poetry (written 1821, published 1840) that "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world."

Poetry's proven and enduring value for me is this very clash and muddle of opinions that mirror the strangeness of the human soul, and human endeavour. Studying Coleridge - a victim of opium addiction and bipolarity - is incredibly rewarding because so much of the work is unfinished and comes alive in startling, dramatic contradictions. Similarly, for me, with other favourites  - Poe and Yeats. They are liltingly seductive as lovely music. But - to pinch from Whitman - they contain multitudes, and swing from bleakest pessimism to transcendent optimism. The twentieth-century modernists, from Eliot to Robinson Jeffers, are less satisfying for me, because they are less conflicted, as though resigned to the spiritual closed door that comes with citification.

I'm an optimist (or an optimistic existentialist, to coin a Colin Wilson wisdom), so poetry that refuses resignation or park-your-car definition still enthralls me. I published my first poetry in David Marcus's New Irish Writing in my teens, and have never stopped reading, debating and writing it. When it comes to poetry, Plato frankly annoys me, despite the glamour of mythology and apologia. If I were Ion, I would have told him/Socrates to piss off. And then I'd have gone up the mountain and written a Limerick about the professorial aristocracy. I like the blazing, courageous search for beauty in the arc from Poe's Al Aaraaf to the blistering, extraordinary, visionary Eureka. And I love the ditzy madness of Yeats's sexy gyres in A Vision. Experiment, self-seeking, life-seeking, contextualisation, resolving -  all of it seems proper, brilliant grist to the writer, be he historian, philosopher or Beatle. And so assembling my new collection of poems, The Magic Triangle Cantos, has been the most stimulating, life-enhancing of exercises. And it's coming your way.

What are the poems aspiring to? Truth? What is truth? These poems are chaos and comfort. Written in beds, on planes, while driving. Poems about mountains. Or maybe none of the above.

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SCRAPBOOK: REDFORD BOOK TOUR 2011 & DIRECTING BOBCOM

Michael's diary continues to be dominated by his creative authoring of BOBCOM (www.bobcom.com), the interactive IT-TV resource for new music artists. The last year was spent writing BOBCOM's narrative and supervising production of the BOBCOM premier Channel 4 television series, Sounds from the Cities, starring Mat Horne. In mid-year Michael toured the USA, promoting BOBCOM and Robert Redford: The Biography. Here's a scrapbook overview of a very busy year. Main picture: Redford working with Michael, at Michael's home in Dublin, on Redford's biography. Second Row, left to right: 1) Michael discusses the making of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid on stage at the American Film Institute Theater, Silver Spring, Maryland; 2) The AFI theatre in Silver Spring, Maryland, June 2011. 3) BOBCOM launches at the carnival premiere in Hoxton Square, London, November 2010. Third Row, left to right: 1) Directing actor Mat Horne in Edinburgh for the Channel 4 television series BOBCOM presents SOUNDS FROM THE CITIES, February 2011. 2) Directing BOBCOM's poster lady Honey Cleaver (actress Frances Wingate) in Nottingham Forest, March 2011. 3) Pre-film planning with Pete and Roag Best for BOBCOM's Magical History Tour at the Casbah Club, Liverpool, July 2011.

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WORK IN PROGRESS: POEMS FROM THE MAGIC TRIANGLE CANTOS

The Magic Triangle Cantos, Michael's new book of poetry, will shortly be announced for publication. Below are new poems from the collection. The illustration is from Michael's working journals which are the daily-use basis of all his creative work (See Poetry Notebooks tab, above, for more illustrations).

 

 

THE UNIVERSITY OF WOMEN

(THE MEDLEY, PATTERN, FLOW AND PEAKS)

 

Recanter: supermarketed, sieved, scanned

and sabotaged by science, we grieve for

Tennyson's Ten Years' Silence. We buy

Worchester china fine as bone; belonging

to bone. We avoid byways, containing ourselves

to the four historic idylls (idles)

but no more: our appetite for new words

and worlds is limited by the duration of

parking meters and cups of corporate latte.

And amid it all the Hallams, the advocates, the social

secretary serried women waiting for

the  Married Women's Property Act (1882)

- primping red-buttocked service

under god. In the stilly night, under

the mountains of dreams, there flickers

always the candles of Seneca, the play

inside the play; nature, red in tooth and claw,

and those faces and fragrances which contain me

always. Through the window of rhyme, the

cottage window, we percieve still the stubborn

landscape - no waste land will stem or

cure it: no rat or raped date; no well-suited pessimist.

These women come - the university of their

needs in rich concourse par-lubricated in

seductive sleights by Christ, genderless but

full of fountain. Sweet vale of Avoca, the

babble always takes us to the debt men owe.

No Ten Years' Silence can stop the metamorphosis:

that the window is the mirror

that explains delays.

 

NOMINATED

He was nominated

A bull to auction

He feigned ego, ceased

belief in angels, gave

himself to the repetitive

prose of academic arbiters;

got up.

But the language of goodbyes,

Her pink absences, the cost

of days, drew a hole in

his afternoon, like the assassin.

Nominated flat-footed, squat

and stubborn as a billboard

The screaming calendar

settled song, blew his disguise

Put him on the run

In lost lanes, circular

to scenery, polluted and battered;

full of trees with dates

that measured nominations,

just nominations.

 

DOUGLAS SIRK WITH MY MOTHER AND SON

The span of time a folded fan across an elderly lady’s lap or boys’ toy

The soft and downy horizon, a deer in snow and Jane Wyman’s apple cheeks

So sit down here, surrounded by the technology and phone accounts of

a half a century, sit with Rollo or fruit pastilles and while away the

astonished truth of her and him and Rock and all that came about

 

Douglas Sirk, anonymously in Lugano by the brown autumnal lake,

By the statues of the undebated greats like Ella, by the stagnant water

off the Roman Rhone. The wind, the harvest, the screen and mezzanine,

the pre-revolutionary politics and Restoration inward look,

the Freud and fan and all the earnest fireside stuff that

substitutes possession.

 

Aside you I wish to hold your hand, generations popping like

hottub corn, the Christmas beef, the laughing cavaliers: us always.

I wish to hold your hand but, no matter, Douglas Sirk is between us

holding us all, pre and post and all and ever.

Snow falls and - this incantation answered -  it is indeed December.

 

NOTES FROM A MUNICIPAL FLOWER BED

Parking. Larking on old shores. The mill. The floss of duties. Wait. Go.

The cross. We bear. The striped tiger crossing. The old hands. The boys.

School stripes. Bars. Chocolate wrappers on a dull bookmaker wind.

The drill. The dill drill. The sliding by of busses. Omni. The steam.

Press. The queuey queue for bread or bolls. The cotton. The rotten cotton.

Windows. The sly shine. Ironised women. Mannequins. Promises.

The new. The shiny shutter. The close. The clothes horse. Closing time.

The elongated river. Dry. The tired mouth. The slow foot. The quake.

Rumble. The city mail. Chain mail. Distended duck. A signal sense. Ease.

At last. The park. The part park. The shallow grave. Verdant hush. Bush.

Waves. Wavy bush. The stiff iris. The yellow. The deck. The red. The white.

Accordance with. Sway. Stay. Stop here. A young conversation. The then.

Here and now continuing. Unpark.